Clustering multi-dimensional points is a fundamental task in many fields, and density-based clustering supports many applications as it can discover clusters of arbitrary shapes. This paper addresses the problem of Density-Peaks Clustering (DPC), a recently proposed density-based clustering framework. Although DPC already has many applications, its straightforward implementation incurs a quadratic time computation to the number of points in a given dataset, thereby does not scale to large datasets. To enable DPC on large datasets, we propose efficient algorithms for DPC. Specifically, we propose an exact algorithm, Ex-DPC, and two approximation algorithms, Approx-DPC and S-Approx-DPC. Under a reasonable assumption about a DPC parameter, our algorithms are sub-quadratic, i.e., break the quadratic barrier. Besides, Approx-DPC does not require any additional parameters and can return the same cluster centers as those of Ex-DPC, rendering an accurate clustering result. S-Approx-DPC requires an approximation parameter but can speed up its computational efficiency. We further present that their efficiencies can be accelerated by leveraging multicore processing. We conduct extensive experiments using synthetic and real datasets, and our experimental results demonstrate that our algorithms are efficient, scalable, and accurate.
A time series is a sequence of sequentially ordered real values in time. Time series classification (TSC) is the task of assigning a time series to one of a set of predefined classes, usually based on a model learned from examples. Dictionary-based methods for TSC rely on counting the frequency of certain patterns in time series and are important components of the currently most accurate TSC ensembles. One of the early dictionary-based methods was WEASEL, which at its time achieved SotA results while also being very fast. However, it is outperformed both in terms of speed and accuracy by other methods. Furthermore, its design leads to an unpredictably large memory footprint, making it inapplicable for many applications. In this paper, we present WEASEL 2.0, a complete overhaul of WEASEL based on two recent advancements in TSC: Dilation and ensembling of randomized hyper-parameter settings. These two techniques allow WEASEL 2.0 to work with a fixed-size memory footprint while at the same time improving accuracy. Compared to 15 other SotA methods on the UCR benchmark set, WEASEL 2.0 is significantly more accurate than other dictionary methods and not significantly worse than the currently best methods. Actually, it achieves the highest median accuracy over all data sets, and it performs best in 5 out of 12 problem classes. We thus believe that WEASEL 2.0 is a viable alternative for current TSC and also a potentially interesting input for future ensembles.
We develop a novel computational framework to approximate solution operators of evolution partial differential equations (PDEs). By employing a general nonlinear reduced-order model, such as a deep neural network, to approximate the solution of a given PDE, we realize that the evolution of the model parameter is a control problem in the parameter space. Based on this observation, we propose to approximate the solution operator of the PDE by learning the control vector field in the parameter space. From any initial value, this control field can steer the parameter to generate a trajectory such that the corresponding reduced-order model solves the PDE. This allows for substantially reduced computational cost to solve the evolution PDE with arbitrary initial conditions. We also develop comprehensive error analysis for the proposed method when solving a large class of semilinear parabolic PDEs. Numerical experiments on different high-dimensional evolution PDEs with various initial conditions demonstrate the promising results of the proposed method.
The paper tackles the problem of clustering multiple networks, that do not share the same set of vertices, into groups of networks with similar topology. A statistical model-based approach based on a finite mixture of stochastic block models is proposed. A clustering is obtained by maximizing the integrated classification likelihood criterion. This is done by a hierarchical agglomerative algorithm, that starts from singleton clusters and successively merges clusters of networks. As such, a sequence of nested clusterings is computed that can be represented by a dendrogram providing valuable insights on the collection of networks. Using a Bayesian framework, model selection is performed in an automated way since the algorithm stops when the best number of clusters is attained. The algorithm is computationally efficient, when carefully implemented. The aggregation of groups of networks requires a means to overcome the label-switching problem of the stochastic block model and to match the block labels of the graphs. To address this problem, a new tool is proposed based on a comparison of the graphons of the associated stochastic block models. The clustering approach is assessed on synthetic data. An application to a collection of ecological networks illustrates the interpretability of the obtained results.
We present a novel solver technique for the anisotropic heat flux equation, aimed at the high level of anisotropy seen in magnetic confinement fusion plasmas. Such problems pose two major challenges: (i) discretization accuracy and (ii) efficient implicit linear solvers. We simultaneously address each of these challenges by constructing a new finite element discretization with excellent accuracy properties, tailored to a novel solver approach based on algebraic multigrid (AMG) methods designed for advective operators. We pose the problem in a mixed formulation, introducing the heat flux as an auxiliary variable and discretizing the temperature and auxiliary fields in a discontinuous Galerkin space. The resulting block matrix system is then reordered and solved using an approach in which two advection operators are inverted using AMG solvers based on approximate ideal restriction (AIR), which is particularly efficient for upwind discontinuous Galerkin discretizations of advection. To ensure that the advection operators are non-singular, in this paper we restrict ourselves to considering open (acyclic) magnetic field lines. We demonstrate the proposed discretization's superior accuracy over other discretizations of anisotropic heat flux, achieving error $1000\times$ smaller for anisotropy ratio of $10^9$, while also demonstrating fast convergence of the proposed iterative solver in highly anisotropic regimes where other diffusion-based AMG methods fail.
The formal privacy guarantee provided by Differential Privacy (DP) bounds the leakage of sensitive information from deep learning models. In practice, however, this comes at a severe computation and accuracy cost. The recently established state of the art (SOTA) results in image classification under DP are due to the use of heavy data augmentation and large batch sizes, leading to a drastically increased computation overhead. In this work, we propose to use more efficient models with improved feature quality by introducing steerable equivariant convolutional networks for DP training. We demonstrate that our models are able to outperform the current SOTA performance on CIFAR-10 by up to $9\%$ across different $\varepsilon$-values while reducing the number of model parameters by a factor of $35$ and decreasing the computation time by more than $90 \%$. Our results are a large step towards efficient model architectures that make optimal use of their parameters and bridge the privacy-utility gap between private and non-private deep learning for computer vision.
Local search is an effective method for solving large-scale combinatorial optimization problems, and it has made remarkable progress in recent years through several subtle mechanisms. In this paper, we found two ways to improve the local search algorithms in solving Pseudo-Boolean Optimization(PBO): Firstly, some of those mechanisms such as unit propagation are merely used in solving MaxSAT before, which can be generalized to solve PBO as well; Secondly, the existing local search algorithms utilize the heuristic on variables, so-called score, to mainly guide the search. We attempt to gain more insights into the clause, as it plays the role of a middleman who builds a bridge between variables and the given formula. Hence, we first extended the combination of unit propagation-based decimation algorithm to PBO problem, giving a further generalized definition of unit clause for PBO problem, and apply it to the existing solver LS-PBO for constructing an initial assignment; then, we introduced a new heuristic on clauses, dubbed care, to set a higher priority for the clauses that are less satisfied in current iterations. Experiments on three real-world application benchmarks including minimum-width confidence band, wireless sensor network optimization, and seating arrangement problems show that our algorithm DeciLS-PBO has a promising performance compared to the state-of-the-art algorithms.
In this paper, we present a unified and general framework for analyzing the batch updating approach to nonlinear, high-dimensional optimization. The framework encompasses all the currently used batch updating approaches, and is applicable to nonconvex as well as convex functions. Moreover, the framework permits the use of noise-corrupted gradients, as well as first-order approximations to the gradient (sometimes referred to as "gradient-free" approaches). By viewing the analysis of the iterations as a problem in the convergence of stochastic processes, we are able to establish a very general theorem, which includes most known convergence results for zeroth-order and first-order methods. The analysis of "second-order" or momentum-based methods is not a part of this paper, and will be studied elsewhere. However, numerical experiments indicate that momentum-based methods can fail if the true gradient is replaced by its first-order approximation. This requires further theoretical analysis.
Learning in neural networks is often framed as a problem in which targeted error signals are directly propagated to parameters and used to produce updates that induce more optimal network behaviour. Backpropagation of error (BP) is an example of such an approach and has proven to be a highly successful application of stochastic gradient descent to deep neural networks. We propose constrained parameter inference (COPI) as a new principle for learning. The COPI approach assumes that learning can be set up in a manner where parameters infer their own values based upon observations of their local neuron activities. We find that this estimation of network parameters is possible under the constraints of decorrelated neural inputs and top-down perturbations of neural states for credit assignment. We show that the decorrelation required for COPI allows learning at extremely high learning rates, competitive with that of adaptive optimizers, as used by BP. We further demonstrate that COPI affords a new approach to feature analysis and network compression. Finally, we argue that COPI may shed new light on learning in biological networks given the evidence for decorrelation in the brain.
With the explosive growth of information technology, multi-view graph data have become increasingly prevalent and valuable. Most existing multi-view clustering techniques either focus on the scenario of multiple graphs or multi-view attributes. In this paper, we propose a generic framework to cluster multi-view attributed graph data. Specifically, inspired by the success of contrastive learning, we propose multi-view contrastive graph clustering (MCGC) method to learn a consensus graph since the original graph could be noisy or incomplete and is not directly applicable. Our method composes of two key steps: we first filter out the undesirable high-frequency noise while preserving the graph geometric features via graph filtering and obtain a smooth representation of nodes; we then learn a consensus graph regularized by graph contrastive loss. Results on several benchmark datasets show the superiority of our method with respect to state-of-the-art approaches. In particular, our simple approach outperforms existing deep learning-based methods.
Many tasks in natural language processing can be viewed as multi-label classification problems. However, most of the existing models are trained with the standard cross-entropy loss function and use a fixed prediction policy (e.g., a threshold of 0.5) for all the labels, which completely ignores the complexity and dependencies among different labels. In this paper, we propose a meta-learning method to capture these complex label dependencies. More specifically, our method utilizes a meta-learner to jointly learn the training policies and prediction policies for different labels. The training policies are then used to train the classifier with the cross-entropy loss function, and the prediction policies are further implemented for prediction. Experimental results on fine-grained entity typing and text classification demonstrate that our proposed method can obtain more accurate multi-label classification results.